Antoni Cimolino: Richard III was an evil we could believe in

Richard III was an evil we could believe in

Richard III was the last British king to be killed in battle. Perhaps that’s no accident.

This week, researchers at the University of Leicester confirmed that the human remains found under a British car park are those of the king made infamous by William Shakespeare’s tragedy. Despite the best efforts of the Richard III Society, dedicated to the rehabilitation of Richard Gloucester’s reputation, it is Shakespeare’s depiction of him that still sticks in the popular imagination: a political spider who achieved the throne by a series of murders, including those of the two young princes he imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Shakespeare made unrelenting use of Richard’s physical deformity – confirmed by the skeletal remains, which indicate advanced spinal scoliosis – to amplify his monstrous character, even citing the tradition that he was born with a full set of teeth. In telling the story of an unloved grotesque seeking power and revenge upon those around him, Shakespeare made Richard’s name synonymous with tyranny and political manipulation.

Shakespeare had a relatively free hand to write this nasty tale of a despotic regime because the man who eventually unseated Richard was Queen Elizabeth I’s ancestor Henry, Earl of Richmond, who would become the first of a line of Tudor kings. Politically, it was safe to depict Henry’s predecessor as a villain. But in recounting this story from the past, Shakespeare was also describing the contemporary world he himself knew: that of the Elizabethan police state.

Elizabeth I’s right to succession was debatable – she had been declared a bastard by her father, Henry VIII, who had executed her mother, Anne Boleyn – and her place on the throne never felt completely secure. Eventually excommunicated by the Pope, she became the target of a series of Catholic assassination attempts. In response, she created a prototype of the modern state security system, with a network of spies both within Britain and on the Continent. Attendance at religious services on Sunday was carefully monitored by the state, and any potential sources of religious opposition were eliminated. England became a theocracy like modern Iran. It was for that reason that Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Stuart, the former queen of Scotland whom most Catholics believed to be the rightful British monarch, was executed after 19 years of imprisonment.

The deadly unpredictability of life in such a state – then and now – is brilliantly captured in what’s known as the “strawberry scene” in Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which a seemingly pleasant chat about the innocent activity of berry-picking suddenly erupts into a moment of sheer political terror. Richard’s suspected opponents are denounced – on ludicrous grounds – as witches and traitors, and one, the hapless Lord Hastings, is led away for immediate execution. “O bloody Richard! Miserable England!” Hastings laments. “I prophesy the fearfull’st time to thee / That ever wretched age hath look’d upon” – adding, prophetically, “They smile at me who shortly shall be dead.” Smiles soon disappear from the realm as fear takes hold of the public and especially the political class.

Shakespeare saw the parallel between the arbitrary horrors of Richard’s rule and those of Elizabeth’s. He knew enough about human nature to predict that similar scenes would be re-enacted in his future (“in states unborn and accents yet unknown,” as he put it in another play, Julius Caesar), and he would have had no trouble recognizing the heirs of Richard III in our own time. Millions died in the Gulag camps of Josef Stalin. Hitler cleansed his own Nazi party of opposition before embarking on his “final solution” for the world. Today, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is fighting to maintain a tyrannical grip on his people, just like Shakespeare’s Richard.

But there is a difference.

The scars on the skull and other bones unearthed in the Leicester car park indicate that on August 22, 1485, at the battle of Bosworth field, Richard was surrounded by a mob and hacked to death. Just as Shakespeare depicted it, he was on foot at that moment and would no doubt have given his kingdom for a horse.

It’s a reminder that unlike the tyrants of today, Richard III didn’t just delegate responsibility for preserving his power. He lived near the end of the feudal age: Its code of honour made it impossible for him to stay secure in a castle, far from the front lines. However perverted his cause, he at least had the backbone – twisted as it was – to go personally into battle.

Of course, other British monarchs since Richard have gone to war, but none since him have paid the ultimate price for their ambitions. And just as, after Lincoln, it has become very difficult to get a politician into a theatre, so it has become harder today to lure a despot onto the battlefield.

Perhaps that’s one reason why, repellent as the horrors of tyranny and violent revolution are in any age, Shakespeare’s villain-kings, like Richard III and Macbeth, still fascinate us. The tyrants of our era illustrate only the banality of evil; the ones Shakespeare has left us, the ones prepared to die with harness on their backs, are the ones that capture our imaginations, the ones who, by arousing in us some degree of admiration, however reluctant, may help us to understand the fatal attractiveness of evil.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.